Aristotle says that the polis or city is where a people come together for the sake of the good life. The kind of laws that a city has reflects its conception of how human beings should live, and how they should relate to one another. In the classical world, there was no such thing as a "neutral" political arrangement: all political arrangements are for the sake of bringing people together for the pursuit of some understanding of the human good.
Locke (and his predecessors, including Machiavelli and Hobbes) represent a break in this kind of thinking. To them, liberalism (by which I do not mean modern "leftism," although they are related, but the political and social inheritance of the Enlightenment) is a kind of "truce" between competing conceptions of the good life and human flourishing. Liberal democracy means individuals coming together to escape the uncertainties of the state of nature where no government exists, and agreeing, in large part, to stay out of one another's business.
For Aristotle, what brings a society together is its desire for survival, and what keeps it together is its communal pursuit of its understanding of the good life. For Locke and the heirs of the Enlightenment, people come together for the sake of survival and safety.
Out of this coming together, economies develop. As both Locke, and, more famously, Adam Smith saw, individuals pursuing their self interest leads in large part to mutual cooperation, economic development and the flourishing of the entire community.
The tendency of the market to encourage cooperation between actors (to build businesses, trade resources, etc) has been noted, and the underlying assumption that individuals acting in their own self-interest is a legitimate basis for building society is an idea embedded in Enlightenment liberalism.
But I would argue that self-interested cooperation is not the basis of true community. The kind of economic and political cooperation I referenced is ultimately about people pursuing their own self-interest first, which just happens to coincide with the self-interest of others.
For instance, the business owner hires an employee to work or cooperate with him. Do they have they have the same goals in mind? In one sense, yes. Both are ultimately looking to benefit the business so they can make money. More fundamentally, however, both are looking to benefit themselves, and the good or benefit of the business is simply a means to this end.
True cooperation involves two or more individuals working together for the sake of a goal outside of themselves. So a mother and a father cooperate in raising a child not for their own individual benefit, but for the sake of a child. Or a neighborhood volunteers to take care of a neighbor in distress, for the sake of the ailing neighbor.
I think this is what distinguishes true community from what could be termed an alliance. An alliance (such as a business) involves individuals working together for their own benefit. A community involves individuals working together perhaps in part for their own benefit, but also or primarily for the sake of something beyond themselves.
What does this mean? Liberal democracy is founded on a faith in the sufficiency of self-interested individuals to work together for their mutual benefit. It's founded on what I have termed an alliance. As such, by its understanding of human nature and what is necessary for its flourishing, it will tend to undermine true community, in which members seek a benefit beyond their own. For real community to take root, we must have an understanding of ourselves as part of something greater - whether it be a family, church, neighborhood, city, state, nation, etc - that lays claim on us, and commands our loyalty and devotion beyond mere self-interested calculation. This is something that liberalism, in emphasizing the chosen, contractual nature of our relationships with others, naturally undermines.
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